Labor Day Monday was a wet, rainy, yucky kind of day in Nashville. The remnants of Hurricane Isaac had been around all weekend and it was just one of those weekends where the sun was really never going to come out. After sleeping in a bit we decided to have a “Science Day” Monday and do something a little different on the rainy extra day of our weekend.

I had pinned several Science-y things on Pinterest so we followed several of those and she was having so much fun with it we did a few other things. Our first experiment was a “Dancing Raisins” experiment where you have raisins in one water bottle with just water and pour Sprite in another. The one with Sprite will make them “dance” as the carbonation moves the raisins up and down.

Our second experiment was with balloons, vinegar and baking soda. You fill a bottle about 1/3 full with vinegar and then fill the balloon half full with baking soda.The “tongue of concentration”. Cracks me up every time!Next, you put the balloon on the bottle and let the baking soda fall into the vinegar to create the chemical reaction and blow up the balloon. Brent got us all worried the whole thing was going to explode and pop in our face so he had us run off to the corner.Maybe if you put a ton of baking soda it will explode, but ours certainly didn’t. Even though Brent about scared her half to death she wanted to try it again, so I made Mr Over-reaction be the Science Helper. These experiments were great because they were easy enough she could do all the measuring herself. Pippin was super interested in everything. (not).The balloon blew up to a nice size and we tied this one off and let her play with it. All of the chemicals/gases in it made it a slightly heavier balloon to play with, so that was fun, too. I didn’t have much vinegar on-hand, so we were only able to do it twice, but I picked up some more this week at the store because I know she’ll want to do this one a few more times as well as some other chemical reaction experiments I found involving vinegar.We also did some simple “make your own lava lamp” type experiments. All you need is water, oil, salt, and food coloring. She always picked dark colors that made it hard to see the “lava”, but had fun anyway mixing the ingredients and trying different colors.Dropping the salt in creates the “lava” from the oil becoming heavier and mixing with the water.Lilli had fun playing dress up in some of the new dress up clothes from her cousin Madison.During a brief break in the rain Brent was able to take her on a trike ride over to see the firetruck. The firemen have put some new hanging rings in the tree outside the fire station. The little gymnast just had to try it out!Home Sweet Home!We had a great Labor Day weekend, despite the rain, and are planning to make “science” a more regular part of our down-time activities!